Why does language matter in social investment?

To be an inclusive fund, we need to ensure that our language helps people from all backgrounds feel confident to apply for social investment. This is especially important when people are first engaging us and considering whether we’re right for them.

The issue is not just whether the words we use are easy to understand. It’s also the message behind these words — whatdoes our language choice say about the kind of relationship founders can expect with the Growth Impact Fund, from our first interaction, to possibly a 5–10 year partnership?

The language we use can articulate shared values to our audience, aligning us towards the same goals in achieving social change. Alternatively, it can reflect a world in which entrepreneurs can expect to be striving to prove themselves worthy of acceptance.

Language helps founders decide whether we are the kind of partner that is “truly invested” in the causes they care about. It helps them clarify if we’re a fund worth applying to, or just another powerholder subtly communicating that this is a space where they don’t belong?

What are the risks of getting this wrong?

Confusion. A lack of shared language around social investment means we can’t build the mutual understanding required for us to support social purpose organisations. If we mean one thing by “social impact” and founders mean another, we risk people working to different agendas and sensing a lack of shared values, which undermines relationships.

Many funds respond to these risks by helping entrepreneurs to speak the language of investment. The process becomes focused on finding the words that matter to decision-makers — “runway”, “pipeline”, “working capital”. This approach on its own reiterates the message that those who don’t or can’t talk this way don’t belong in the social investment world.

As a fund, we think we have some responsibility to help founders understand some of this language (which we’ll get to below), but true inclusion needs more than just “jargon busting” or “upskilling”. We also need to communicate in ways that prove social investment is already a space for people that are doing and talking about things differently.

What are we learning about inclusive language at the Growth Impact Fund?

When designing the fund, we phrased questions in our application form in simple, non-technical language wherever possible. We asked for only essential information that could be unpacked in 1:1 conversation. We also included prompts on how to answer — or when it’s okay not to answer — questions that may be new and unfamiliar to those first entering the investment world.

To test how well these measures were working, we ran some feedback sessions with applicants. The feedback was mixed.

Generally, there was a sense that we’re really trying to do things differently. Applicants told us that our application was largely easy to work through, and that the vocabulary and prompts made it simpler than comparable funds’ applications.

“This was one of the easiest and most user friendly that I’ve come across”

“Unlike many others, this one said it would take twenty minutes, and it did!”

Other feedback proved our assumption that founders would value being asked only for essential information, reserving discussion about any more technical details for later 1:1 conversation:

“It was clear from the form that I didn’t need to have everything up front. I saw that this was just the first part of a process and that we could discuss things more in conversation”

However, other feedback showed we’re not quite there yet in terms of our language. There were points where our language still felt ‘academic’ or ‘clinical’. For instance, terms such as “place-based deprivation” stood out to applicants as striking a tone that didn’t match the rest of the form:

“It feels like this part is written for and by people who are one step removed for inequality, and can talk in an objective, cold and dry way”

These terms felt as if they represented the “language of impact measurement” rather than a language of lived experience. This showed a mismatch between what applicants care about and want to share with us and what we are trying to surface. These disconnects might seem small or trivial, but each one risks founders questioning the Fund’s alignment with their mission. If this happens consistently, it can slowly erode trust in the Fund.

There are other, more practical drawbacks to such language use: one interview revealed that an applicant needed support from his mentor, who was already experienced in the social investment world, to understand our requests and complete an application.

So, while we’re moving in the right direction, there are still points where we can simplify our language, and ensure it reflects a deeper commitment to the same values and concerns as our audience.

What are we doing with this feedback?

Whenever we learn something new, we try to respond and make changes. But we’re also balancing our ambition to do things differently with the need to be pragmatic — in this case, the need to support founders in ways that acknowledge the wider social investment world that we work within.

For instance, if other funds persist in talking to founders in the traditional language of investment, do we have a responsibility to support our applicants to understand that? If our applicants are raising funding as part of a round and other funds are going to ask them for “pitch-decks”, wouldn’t it be wrong for us to set false expectations by avoiding this term entirely? Especially if we believe that documents like this are often helpful support for a truly relational and unbiased experience for our audience.

On balance, we’ve decided not to erase all traditional investment vocabulary from our process. Instead, we are careful to consider at which stages in our process it’s appropriate to use these terms, and how to frame any questions that do.

For instance, we don’t think much technical vocabulary is necessary at the point applicants first register interest in the Fund. In light of this, we’ve reviewed our application form with the help of our Impact Group, eliminating such language wherever possible, or giving immediate explainers if we think specific investment terms are necessary.

We’ve also made it clearer why we are asking questions, especially when those requests might not immediately align with what our audience wants to share. For instance, we’ve added further explainers about our need to collect quite narrow and coarse EDI data to help us assess eligibility for the fund. Without this framing, alongside the broader space we’ve added for founders to articulate their lived experiences and ambitions around diversity in their own terms, founders may be rightly concerned about the extent to which we’re interested in the value of their prior experiences, over simply ticking boxes and measuring the outcomes.

You can see the latest version of our application form here.It’s not perfect. And we are still exploring with our applicants and partners how we can continue to improve it, alongside reasonable adjustments for those whose first language is not English, or accessible alternatives to text-based applications. Please let us know if there are further opportunities for improvement.

Next steps — demystifying the sector

We know that all the above changes need to be paired with broader actions to re-shape the sector in favour of more inclusive ways of communicating with and evaluating candidates. In a recent investor roundtable hosted by Growth Impact Fund, we made a commitment to turn the tables and make it our responsibility as a sector to better understand and use the language that entrepreneurs are already using — reversing the direction of the “jargon busting” that the sector usually favours.

We know that this longer-term ambition for a shared language that centres on the experience of entrepreneurs would be a giant step towards rebalancing power in social investment. But to take the rest of the sector on that journey with us, we will continue to share the smaller, incremental steps we’re taking in that direction. We hope these can help build the capacity and confidence of our investor audience, which are seen to better support the people we want to serve.

Join the conversation

We are inspired by participatory approaches to finance that are leading the way right now, such as that pursued by Camden Giving. We’d love to learn from people involved in similar projects across funding, investment and wider sectors. If you have suggestions, thoughts, or examples of good practice around language that you’d like to share with us, — please add a comment to this blog or get in touch with the team.